


watching stars collide

by pleasanthell



Category: Supergirl (TV 2015)
Genre: F/F, everything that resembles canon is purely coincidental
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-16
Updated: 2019-10-06
Packaged: 2020-10-19 16:56:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 13,174
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20660588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pleasanthell/pseuds/pleasanthell
Summary: There was a crash of thunder and the explosion hit Alex again. It was a searing pain in her chest. She could see the fire from the explosion and the darkness that came afterward. When her eyes adjusted, she saw Maggie on the ground.Alex had crawled across the ground, glass cutting into her hands and shards of wood digging into her knees. She could see the blood. There was so much of it.The feeling overcame her again. Alex crumbled into the damp floor and looked at the spot on the concrete that still held the shadows of the pool around Maggie.





	1. Chapter 1

Alex stepped across the threshold of the broken apartment. The rain gently tapped on the tarp some kind soul had hung over the sedan-sized hole in the wall. It hadn’t stopped the rain from coming into the apartment and growing mold up the side of the wall.

Alex took a few steps until something crunched under her boot. She stopped and picked up her foot. Maggie wasn’t big on pictures or picture frames, but it was one of Maggie’s favorites.

She picked it up with her gloves and brushed the glass away from her own smiling face. It was her and Maggie and Kara and Eliza. Kara’s outstretched arm took up part of the frame of the impromptu group selfie at brunch one morning. Alex was surprised that Maggie still had the picture. But there was no telling if it had been stashed away in a drawer when… it happened.

There was a crash of thunder and the explosion hit Alex again. It was a searing pain in her chest. She could see the fire from the explosion and the darkness that came afterward. When her eyes adjusted, she saw Maggie on the ground.

Alex had crawled across the ground, glass cutting into her hands and shards of wood digging into her knees. She could see the blood. There was so much of it.

The feeling overcame her again. Alex crumbled into the damp floor and looked at the spot on the concrete that still held the shadows of the pool around Maggie.

The tears that wouldn’t stop that night came back. Alex yanked her mask up and leaned back on the wall. She put her face in her hands. Her tears fell with the rain outside.

Maggie had been on the ground and unresponsive. Blood streaked across the face Alex loved so much. The face she’d kissed every inch of. Maggie’s shirt was torn and it was nearly impossible to tell all the places she was bleeding from.

When she held Maggie in her arms, she was so sure that Maggie was breathing her last few shallow breaths. And Alex just… she froze. She was a doctor, someone who could heal and when Maggie needed her most, Alex couldn’t remember anything. She could only feel a paralyzing panic.

Her hands were shaking and covered in Maggie’s blood when Kara took her away. Kara flew so far and so fast, dodging the kryptonite bullets that were meant to take her down. And Alex just sat there, Maggie’s blood crawling up the knees of her pants.

And Alex had let the elements get into Maggie’s apartment. It felt like a massive disrespect to the love of her life, her ex. She had let the rain and the mold and the dirt get into Maggie’s sanctuary. She had failed her again.

A sob escaped Alex and she dropped her head onto her knees. She had failed. She had failed miserably. She couldn’t protect Maggie in time. She couldn’t stop Cadmus from taking over National City.

The building could collapse on top of her at any second and it would pale in comparison to the guilt and responsibility Alex felt.

There was a soft pop in her ear and Winn’s voice timidly interrupted her mourning. “Hey Alex. We got a Cadmus team breaking into the food bank down the street.”

But she still had a job to do. She rose from the wet ground and wiped her face. She pulled her mask down. “How many?”

“Six,” he answered. “Standard low-level strike team.”

She walked to the tarp that covered the wall and pushed it aside. She stood on the broken bricks of the exterior of the building and looked down at the wet street below.

She couldn’t save Maggie, but she could fight like hell to save the city she loved. With one last breath to get herself together, Alex jumped out of the window, diving straight into the fray.


	2. Chapter 2

“What-what do you want?” he asked, backing away.

“Empty your pockets,” she said to him.

His heel caught the ground in his haste to get away. He managed to keep himself on his feet, but the faceless form was advancing on him still, slowly and deliberately. His eyes darted around. “I don’t have any cash.”

The expressionless figure stated again. “Empty your pockets.”

When his back hit the bar, he stopped and put his fists up, ready to fight. He took a swing, but it was dodged with ease. He took another swing. Long, brown hair waved as she ducked out of the way again.

In a last ditch effort to get away, he vaulted over the bar and putting the sturdy wood between them. “I don’t have anything you want.”

“Empty. Your. Pockets.” The distinctly female voice commanded from the other side of the bar.

He looked around again, falling back on his training. This time he hit pay dirt.

In the time it took him to kneel down and grab the sawed-off shotgun under the bar, she had landed on the ground next to him. He raised the shotgun, but she grabbed onto the space where the metal met the wood and slammed the back of her body into his, twisting the gun out of his grip as she went.

He finally considered her much smaller statute and started to grab at her from behind.

She pushed the butt of the shotgun under her arm and pulled the trigger. The blast took out the cabinet under the bar and the kickback nailed the man square in the gut, knocking the wind out of him. He bent over in agony, gasping to breathe.

When he started to get up again, she didn’t get him the change to get more than one foot on the ground. She swung hard at his temple and knocked him out, slumped against the back of the bar.

She dropped the shotgun and started searching his pockets. She found a wallet that she checked the ID of, but then dropped. She searched his front pockets and found a keyring. She held the keys in her gloved hand and looked them over, finding what she was looking for.

She knew what someone would be one the way soon after the shotgun blast so she took the keys with her toward the back door. As she walked, she pulled something off of the ring that wasn’t a key. It was a small USB device. He had lied when he said he didn’t have what she came for.

In the alley behind the bar, her sleek, all-black motorcycle was parked between a dumpster and the street. She checked her watch. In and out in three minutes. It was a nice little record she could keep to herself.

She threw her leg over the bike and slipped a small spray bottle out of her pocket, no bigger than a tube of lipstick and sprayed her face. She could feel the spray taking affect in the form a light tingle. Then she removed the mask from her face that hid her features in what looked like a layer of skin.

She pocketed the spray and the mask and pulled her full-face helmet on, tucking her hair into it. She started the motorcycle, pulled a quick U-turn, and sped off into the small town night.


	3. Chapter 3

She slammed down the clutch and switched gears, careering around the corner, through the empty streets of National City. In the rearview mirror she could see the three SVUs behind her. They had red and blue flashing lights, but they weren’t cops. They were a one way ticket to disappearing for the rest of her life – which would probably be pretty short if they caught her.

As she turned onto an open road, they started to line up behind her. She saw guns pointing out a few of the windows and they were taking shots at her. For the most part they bullets bounced off her borrowed car, creating tiny sparks.

But the back window was taking a beating and Alex wasn’t sure how much longer it would hold. She threw the wheel to the left, the back of the car sliding forward as the front took the turn. She got the car under control and pushed the car as fast as she could.

The SUVs had a harder time keeping up, having to slow to make the harsh turn.

It looked like she was going to lose them as she the city street started to get rough and the office buildings on either side of the street faded into warehouses.

She looked in the rearview mirror and saw a long crack had formed across the back window. It wasn’t going to take much more of a beating. She was going to have to get away and fast. That last thought left her head when she saw one of the operatives in the closest SUV maneuvering a large metal tube out of the window.

“Shit,” Alex breathed and reached behind her head, yanking the mask of her uniform over her face, feeling it seal itself to the neck of her uniform. She swerved onto a dirt road leading toward what she hoped was an abandoned warehouse.

She pressed the button to open the moonroof and it slowly slid open as she sped the car faster toward the warehouse. She watched the slow progression of the moonroof opening, then checked the rearview. The operative was sitting on the window of the moving SUV and pointing the missile launcher right at her.

“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon,” she urged the moonroof. She watched the quickly approaching warehouse wall she was heading straight for, then back at the moonroof that was almost open enough for her to jump out of. “C’mon.”

She saw the light in the rearview mirror flash with the ignition of the rocket. It was her starting gun. She jumped up into her seat and leapt through the moonroof, her suit giving her the power to fly up from inside the car, thirty feet in the air. Her momentum drove her forward, fluttering cape stabilizing her enough so she could put her arms out before crashing through the second story warehouse windows.

The force of the missile hitting the car pushed it into the wall under her and sent a scorching blast pushing her deeper into the warehouse. Once again, the cape made it easier for her to maneuver in the air, managing to turn around and get her feet under herself as she approached the ground.

When her feet hit the ground, she continued to slide until she slammed her hand into the ground, gloved fingers digging into the dirt, ending in a perfect three-point stance on the corroded warehouse floor.

The SUVs all lined up outside of the massive hole in the side of the warehouse. Guns were drawn as men in black tactical gear started to crawl over the smoking rubble to get inside. They spoke in quick short burst not wanting to be overheard or understood.

The men spread out on the first floor of the warehouse. It was a wide open space with two long catwalks on either side and crossed by steel beams.

Their flashlight swept through the warehouse until one of the men spotted a disturbance in the debris on the ground. Two boot skids followed by another made by fingers. The man who found it looked for his fellow operative on the right but found he had disappeared.

“Dave?” he asked, stepping away from where his comrade had been. He didn’t get another word out when his nose and mouth were covered, followed by a strong arm was around his throat, cutting off his oxygen and knocking him out.

“Hey!” one of the other operatives spotted something hanging from the rafters and their guns all pointed up at it, flashlights illuminating one of the own, an unconscious Dave, hanging by a steel wire wrapped around his boot.

A flashlight beam bounced around as another operative disappeared, gun laying in the dirt.

The operatives all started flailing about, trying to get a light on the dark figure that was stalking them from the shadows.

One of the operatives started running for the SUVs that were still parked outside, but mid-step was swept up in a heavy black material and disoriented until he was free of the material and running back into the warehouse. He stopped and looked around, knowing he had just been assailed, but now sure how.

Then he saw two feet coming for his chest, swinging from a cable attached to the beams above. Alex knocked the operative down, slamming him into a pillar and knocking him out. She had picked through the crowd of operatives until there was one left.

He raised his gun a her and she grabbed the barrel of it, crushing it in her fist. She was quick to grab her cape and pull it in front of her body as the operative fired the crippled gun, setting off what had become a bomb in his hands.

She looked up at her handywork, the piles of operatives on the ground and the few hanging from the rafters. Then she looked at the hole in the warehouse. She was tired and ready to go home.

She walked through the rubble of the warehouse wall and popped open the hood of the still running SUV closest to the warehouse. She took a moment, looking through the engine before pulling a black box out of the engine, breaking the cables that connected it to the SUV. She crawled on top of the SUV and pried the police light bar from the roof, her feet making indentions in the roof as she pulled up, but she broke it free and tossed it aside.

Without the tracker in the engine and the lightbar on top it was just a normal creepy SUV instead of a Cadmus issued patrol vehicle. She pulled away from the warehouse and started heading back to base.

Alex had to ditch the SUV a few blocks away and used her fancy new suit to leap across the rooftops of the buildings in downtown National City. It was disheartening to see what the city she loved become. The normally vibrant nighttime streets were vacant, pushing indoors by mandatory curfews. The people of National City were caught in the middle of a war and were paying the price.

She made a half-hearted leap from an older building onto a slightly newer one, catching herself on the glass balcony. She looked around for a way up to the roof when she spotted a familiar sight. Across the street a billboard hung on the corner of a shorter, brick building. The advertisement that had been on the billboard had faded away, but the bright yellow symbol of the noble house of El, the Supergirl symbol had been painted over it. But something else was painted next to that. It was smaller, but it hit Alex so much harder.

Next to her sister’s bright yellow symbol was a blotch of red, mostly shaped like a ‘V’ with two peaks in the middle of the dip. She looked down at her down chest, the source of the suit’s abilities, the malfunctioning radio, and the accidental red shape Winn didn’t consider when he put it in the suit. She ran her hand over the symbol on her chest. She knew what the news called her. She just didn’t know the people of National City – the resistance in National City- ranked her with Supergirl in terms of heroes of the city.

It reignited the fire in her chest. She was going to keep fighting for the city. She was going to fight until her last breath. She’d be someone worthy to stand next to Supergirl in the war against Cadmus.

She jumped up to the next balcony, making her way to the roof so she could continued her journey to the sleek, but boarded up building belonging to the last good Luthor.

Lena’s helicopter was grounded on the helipad in the middle of the roof. It was too dangerous for the public face of the resistance to use anything that could be shot down so easily. Alex bypassed the door to the stairs leading into the building and jumped off the roof nearest the door, landing soundlessly a few floors down on a terrace that had once been a restaurant, but had since shut down due to the dangers of being seen associating with the Luthor name. Alex made her way to the glass door of the restaurant and put in a code on the newly installed keypad. It flashed green and she stepped inside.

She knew this floor was empty as were the ten or so under her. DEO operations had been moved into the basement and parking garage under the L-Corp building and the bottom ten floors of the building had been fortified with bulletproof windows, blast doors, and panic rooms. The L-Corp building was a fortress, the citadel that stood against the encroaching Cadmus threat.

When she was down into the safe floors, Alex pulled her mask off, pushing it back like a hood. She ruffled her hair and took a large gulp of fresh air. She mask had a built in air filter because she’d been finding herself in a lot of fires lately and it was probably just her brain, but breathing outside of the mask felt cleaner.

She tapped the red part of the suit, a kind of fiber based computer Lena and Winn created a few weeks ago. The radio still shorted out sometimes, but for the most part it was a marvel of engineering. She could hear static travel up from the communication device in the neck of her suit. Apparently tapping it was a way to help it work.

“Alex?” she heard her sister’s panicked voice. “Where are you?”

“Tenth floor,” Alex answered, putting in another code, giving a retinal scan and pushing through the door from the dark, vacated space of the floor into the lit, bustling base of operations for the DEO. “My radio shorted.”

Winn’s exhausted voice came over the radio. “I think I figured out what happened to it.” He paused then stated. “You crashed it into a warehouse.”

“I’m almost out of cars,” Lena added, but she sounded far away and like she was talking to someone else.

Alex smiled and ducked her head, making her way to the elevator. “Tell Lena I’ll find her another car. I promise.”

She rode the elevator down to the ground floor and exited. There were DEO guards all over the first floor, dressed to look like the L Corp private security forces. They were stationed at all the doors even though the blast doors had been rolled down for the night. Alex gave a few nods as she made her way toward the double doors that opened up into offices. The offices were in use, occupied by DEO agents who were in the building to make it look like Lena was running her regular company as normal in the face of all the threats against her. It gave the people of National City hope.

At the end of the hallway was the solid wooden doors of a fake security company. The receptionist smiled at Alex as she passed and Alex smiled politely back. It was one of the few actually working businesses in the building and they were cleaning up making money hand over fist as the richest people in National City demanded to be protected at all times as they tried to keep their businesses running in a desperate attempt to keep up with Lena Luthor who hadn’t broken stride.

Another set of codes and retinal scans let Alex into the door behind the receptionist. It opened up into a large set of stairs that descended into the heartbeat of the resistance. Once she was off the stairs, the command center of the DEO spread out before her. Walls of computers and monitors showed every surveilled inch of the city as well as news feeds from all over the world.

Kara was the first one to leave the round war table in the middle of the command center and run to Alex. She swept her sister up in her arms. “I hate it when your radio goes out.”

“Me too,” Alex sighed, holding onto her sister. She kissed Kara’s cheek and pulled away. She looked toward the war table where J’onn was speaking to Vasquez. When he finished Vasquez ran off, disappearing deeper into the facility.

Alex and Kara walked toward J’onn who hugged Alex when she was close enough. “You did well.”

“I didn’t get anything,” Alex sighed, shaking her head. She ruffled her hair again, hating the feeling that the compression of the full head mask did to her hair.

J’onn tapped on the table and a hologram flashed up. The three dimensional map of National City glowed a soft blue. He put his hand on one end of the city and swept his hand to the right, turning the entire map like a turntable. Then he zoomed in and pointed. “Thanks to you, the operatives who chased you, limped back to the nearest Cadmus outpost.” He tapped in the map and a squat automotive garage turned bright green. “I’ve sent a surveillance team out to determine the outpost and get possible weak points.”

“You did well,” Kara told her sister, rubbing her back.

Alex nodded. She looked at the highlighted garage then up at the wall of TVs that put Cat Grant’s office to shame. She scanned the surveillance feeds for someone in trouble and the news for new clues to help in their war.

“You should get some sleep,” J’onn told her, closing down the map.

“I’ll take your suit down to Tech,” Kara stated, picking up Alex’s hand. She brushed off some of the dirt. She hated so much that she couldn’t be out as much as Alex, but Cadmus was somehow loaded with synthetic Krypontite to destroy Krypton again. She could do quick missions, but they had to be less then fifteen minutes each and very spaced out. “I think I figured out the radio problem.”

Alex could hear the hopelessness in her sister’s voice. She felt bad for Kara who was stuck in the building most of the day. She was allowed on the upper floors during the day as long as she was dressed as Kara and stayed near Lena and her legion of body guards.

Alex slung her arm around her sister. It was a strange shift in dynamic.

“Hey look!” someone called.

All eyes moved to the agent who was pointing at the wall of TVs. Cat Grant was on the TV, sitting at a news desk next to the host. Someone turned the sound on and it filled the room. Cat looked tired, but still fierce as ever. The host was asking her a question when the sound came on “… new masked vigilante?”

Cat straightened her back. “I would  _ not _ say that this  _ hero _ is a copycat or a menace. This does not mean that Supergirl isn’t still fighting for our city. This means that more people are stepping up. A qualified, astounding woman with remarkable skills has decided to protect her family by hiding her identity while fighting against a fascist, illegal entity like Cadmus.”

A round of gasps made it’s way around the room. Cat Grant was one of the few people who would speak aloud the name of their enemy. It was like painting a target on one’s forehead, but Cat had done it over and over again.

There was camera footage played behind Cat of a different red, spray-painted symbol on the boarded up outside of an office tower that had become nearly vacant. The reporter asked, “But are you afraid this kind of vigilantism will lead to more?”

“I hope it does,” Cat stated. She turned to look into the camera. “We need more people who are not afraid to stand up to this threat. We need smart people who know the skills they have and can put them to use. We may not need more people like Supergirl or…” Cat paused then stated, “Batwoman. We need people to keep running their businesses in the face of this threat. We need people to help the displaced citizens of National City. We need people to stand in the way of their trucks and their tanks and keep them from these so-called patrols. You can wear a mask to protect those you love, but you still have to stand up and  _ do something _ .”

The words hung in the air as Cat stared into the TV and the command center was silent. Then, the reported stuttered out a thanks and they switched to the next segment on the news.

“Batwoman?” Kara asked, turning to her sister.

Alex looked down at the red ‘V’ on her chest. She could see it. She skulked around in the dark and surprised was her favorite form of combat. She nodded. “Yeah, I mean if Cat said it…”

“Batwoman!” Winn whooped, running into Command with a laptop in his hand. He smiled and ran straight to Alex, hugging her tight. “I just saw. You’ve got a vigilante name! From Cat Grant!”

“How much coffee have you had?” Alex asked.

Winn stepped back. “A lot. Then Vasquez took away my mug, but I put a straw in the coffee pot so I’m going back to work.” He started to walk off, but stopped and spoke to Kara. “Your designs for the new cloaking material are brilliant. As always.” He kissed Kara’s cheek and walked off.

Vasquez came running around the corner where Winn had come from, panting with a mug in her hand. Kara and Alex just pointed in the direction Winn took off in. Vasquez bent over to catch her breathe for a second before nodding and taking off in a job after him.

“Both of you should get some sleep,” J’onn walked up behind the Danvers sisters and ushered them toward the hallway that would lead them to their beds.

They both kept walking when J’onn left them.

They were down a floor when Alex asked, “How’s the Med Bay? Anything new?”

“You’re going to bed,” Kara told Alex, putting her arm around Alex’s waist. “You can check in the morning. Mom has it all covered for now.”

Alex started to resist and change course to get to the Med Bay when Kara forced her forward.

“You may be extra strong in that suit, but I’m still stronger,” Kara warned her. “Bed. Now.”1

Alex let Kara lead her down another set of narrow metal stairs to the first floor underground. It had been converted from storage. The floor was still concrete, but had been cleaned. Some of the walls were metal and some were drywall and there didn’t seen to be a rhyme or reason as to why either was put where it was. They were just the materials that were handy when they were fortifying the L-Corp building.

People that worked in Command and were associated with Command slept on the uppermost floor of the basement, B1. The only person with their own room was Lena and it was for the simple fact they ran out of bunk beds. Lena slept on a cot in the smallest room. It only fit her bed and a desk. She didn’t seem to mind it, even insisting that she liked it, though Kara knew the lack of luxury was starting to grate on her.

Just off the stairs was a common area. There was a couch and a TV that no one ever turned on. There was also a conference table that had been converted into a dining area. Food was usually brought up from the parking garage where most of the food was prepared and the agents that worked in Command would wolf it down as quickly as possible and return to their duties upstairs.

Past the common area, a long ramshackle hallway had been piecemealed together. Construction lights had been strung along the hallway to give the exhausted operatives light on their way down the hallway.

They walked past Lena’s room, J’onn and Vasquez’s room, Winn and James’s room, then the room Eliza shared with another scientist. Neither Kara nor Alex liked their mom being present, but she had insisted on coming back to help and had since become a valuable asset, not only as a scientist, but as their mom, supporting them both as they punched their way through Cadmus.

Kara opened the door to the room she shared with Alex and watched Alex step through the doorway that had been cut oddly, leaving six inches of steel for them to step over. Kara thought it felt like a room on a ship, stepping through the heavy, ovular doorway.

Alex crossed through first and Kara followed, closing the door behind them. Soft Christmas lights hung along the ceiling, something Kara had done to make their room more homey during the time she was locked in the building. Their beds were perfectly made with the blankets they managed to swipe from their respective apartments. They had a folding table against the opposite wall from the bunk beds where Kara studied so she could help Winn and Lena. She may be a few advanced degrees behind them both, but she was catching up quickly.

Kara had also made a place for them to hang their clothes with a metal cable strung from the end of a top bunk to a hook in the wall. Sometimes Kara imagined it was like a college dorm if their college was the apocalypse.

Alex pulled out the desk chair and plopped down, unsealing her boots from her pants and kicking them off. Then she slowly took off her uniform while Kara picked out something for her sister to wear to bed. Once Alex was stripped, she grabbed the towel hanging off the end of the bottom bunk. “Shower first.”

Kara nodded, handing Alex the sweatpants and t-shirt she was giving Alex to sleep in. They had both lost most of their belongings, having had to abandon most things in their apartments completely the day Cadmus took to the streets.

Alex wrapped the towel around her body and shuffled out the door toward the showers at the far end of the hall.

It took a few days, and some brilliant engineering by Lena, to get functioning communal bathrooms on every basement floor and the top two levels of the parking garage, but it was there and after a day like Alex had, it was glorious.

A few of the residents had hung tattered shower curtains using crisscrossing lines of twine and thin metal cables in the wide open shower, but Alex wasn’t modest. She didn’t have room for that kind of feeling anymore, but she respected the people who did and found an unoccupied section of the shower that had been closed off by the hanging plastic. She hung up her clean clothes and towel on a hook on the wall and wretched on the water.

No one else was showering at that time, so her hunt for shampoo through the flimsy stalls was quick and not as polite as it usually was. She threw open shower curtains until she found one of the bottles of shampoo and body wash they all shared. She placed them on the ground by her shower spray and stood under it, letting the water over take her.

The shower was kind and pleasant until she was lathering her body with the bodywash. Every time her hand passed over a bruise or open cut, it stung. She wasn’t going to go to bed dirty though. She would maintain some kind of civility in that way.

Once her shower was done, she got dressed in the dry part of the shower and toweled off her hair as she made her way back to hers and Kara’s room. Kara was gone when she opened the door. She stepped into her room and hung the towel on the end of her bed. She got the bottom bunk because she lost at rock-paper-scissors, but Alex was fine with flopping down on the bottom after missions.

She turned down the blankets and rolled into the bed. It felt cozy despite being a metal frame with thin mattresses held up by old metal springs.

As she lay there, Alex looked from the folding table desk to the door. She knew she was safe and surrounded by people she loved, but she felt lonely.

She rolled onto her back, her eyes going right to the picture she had tucked between the metal frame and Kara’s mattress. She pulled down and sighed softly. Tears didn’t usually come so soon, but she was exhausted and didn’t have the fortitude to hold them in.

Her fingers lightly traced Maggie’s face across the smooth photo. It was a picture Kara had taken of them at game night. After a few glasses of wine and a few very stellar charades victories they were both so happy. It was less than four months later that Alex Danvers became Cadmus enemy number one as Director of the DEO at the time. She had since abdicated back to J’onn so she could work in the field more, but she was still high on Cadmus’s list.

Alex looked at the photo in her hand. She remembered the confusion and then sorrow in Maggie’s eyes after Cadmus had attempted to kidnap her while she was working at her precinct. Luckily they had underestimated their target Detective, but it had made Maggie realize that as long as she was in National City she was a danger to Alex. She doubted informing Cadmus of their breakup would change their mind about targeting her.

Alex didn’t know where she was, but there was a stack of folders under Alex’s bed, handwritten intelligence data Maggie had gathered, mailed to her old apartment in National City where an alien friend of Maggie’s would pick it up and hand deliver it to the L-Corp building.

It was never anything personal. Just pages and pages of notes about Cadmus operations and safehouses. Somehow the notes made Alex feel closer to Maggie so she kept the originals under her bed while the agents outside worked from copies.

But damn she missed Maggie. It had been months since she’d seen her. Alex counted the days in her head and found it had nearly been a year. She had celebrated Christmas and New Years without Maggie. She had seen spring bloom over the destruction of National City. She had felt the sting of Summer without her. They were knee deep into fall and Alex had since shouldered the responsibility of an entire city on her own. She was strong enough to do it and she knew it was the most logical that she step up to stand next to Supergirl and Guardian on the front lines of the war. She just missed the one person who could make her feel vulnerable and open by just her proximity.

It had taken her a while to put the picture up. It stayed in the small box of belongs she brought with her, but it didn’t feel right to put it up. Maggie wasn’t her sweetheart that was waiting for hwer to return from war. Maggie was her ex. But after one rough night before her suit was ready, Alex had been skulking around trying to figure out how Cadmus was abducting so many aliens. She remembered thinking that it was a case Maggie wouldn’t have slept over until she solved. It prompted Alex to start asking herself  _ what would Maggie do? _ , which led her to a few leads she hadn’t considered before and eventually, the cutting off of a Cadmus alien smuggling ring. The picture had been hanging up in Alex’s bunk ever since, bringing her comfort and inspiration.

Alex was surrounded by people – people she loved, people she cared about, but she felt like an island.

She sniffled when she heard Kara greeting someone in the hallway. She put the picture back where she kept it and rolled away from the door, pretending to be asleep. She could feel a tear tickling her nose as it ran down her face.

She felt her mattress dip down and Kara kissing her head. She whispered, “Goodnight, Superhero.”

Alex gritted her teeth to keep from sobbing. She waited for the creaks of Kara coming to rest on the bunk above hers before wiping her eyes with her blanket. She stared at the wall, tears running down her cheeks until exhaustion overtook her and she fell asleep.


	4. Chapter 4

She was thrown out of sleep by an explosion that happened nearly a year ago. She’d been startled awake by the same explosion over and over. Maggie found herself with her head in her hands and her feet on the floor. For a moment, she forgot where she was.

But when she put her hands on the rough couch she had been sleeping on, she remembered. She looked over at the bright green numbers on the microwave. It was only four twelve in the morning.

She ran her hands over her hair and stood up from the brown plaid makeshift bed. Her blanket started to go with her, but dropped on the floor as it fell off of her legs. There wasn’t much room to walk in the small trailer. She started on one end of the trailer, near the table where her closed laptop sat. She tapped the top of it and scanned the kitchen on the other wall. She moved past the clean kitchen, running her hand along the plastic sink. She walked past the small closed off square that was her bathroom and then stopped at the bedroom door. She checked to make sure it was still locked before moving back to the couch.

She lay down on her stomach and reached under the couch. She felt her gun underneath, a small comfort in a dangerous world.

The longer she lay the more she realized that she wasn’t going to be able to go back to sleep. She had been startled awake and adrenaline was in her blood. She rolled onto her back and looked at the ceiling. There was a large worrying brown spot on it, but she wasn’t going to raise a stink about it. She was renting a trailer in, what she assumed was one of the first trailer parks in the country, in the desert.

She got up from the couch and stopped in her tiny bathroom before heading outside. It was still dark, but the air was warm. The deck that led into her front door creaked when she stepped out onto it. She could see the stars through the holes in the tarp that had been lain across a square of two-by-fours the landlord called an awning.

Maggie walked down the rickety stairs, her boots landing in the dirt. She hated the dirt. There was dirt everywhere. She’d never seen so much dirt. She never lived anywhere with such a lack of concrete. Even when she lived in Nebraska, it wasn’t as barren.

But when she looked up, she’d never seen as many stars. She was always told that when people looked up at the stars they felt so alone, but she didn’t feel alone. She knew that most of the stars in the sky had planets and most of the planets had life. Some of her best friends had come from different planets. She knew that more of them would come to earth, intergalactic travelers coming to make a life for themselves or just stopping by on their way somewhere else.

She opened the beat up cooler next to the bottom step and pulled out a bottle of water. It had been filled with cheap beer when she moved in. The landlord called it a perk.

There was a couch up against deck with some kind of prickly succulent plant growing in the dirt next to it. Maggie had tried to move it, but found that it was holding up part of the lattice around the deck. She kicked the couch twice to make sure there wasn’t any kind of animal in it.

Then she fell back on it, water in hand. She had a few hours until the only gym in town opened so there wasn’t much for her to do. She had to wait for the four thirty-five train to rumble through town before she could go running. It felt like all she had was time.

She finished off her water just as the train started its way through town. It had been hard to sleep through when she first arrived in Unincorporated Leigh County, but after a few months, it was just part of the sounds of the town. Just like the wind turbines on the other side of the hills and the helicopters flying in and out of the underground facility built into a mountain at the edge of town.

She stood up and tossed the empty water bottle into the green bin near the front of her trailer and rolled her neck. She didn’t have her watch on, but she knew that the train would be gone in a few minutes and she could get a run in.

After changing and strapping on her watch, she got her gun out from under the couch where she slept. She tucked it into the hidden holster she’d sewn into the back of her running shorts. She started to walk away, but turned back around to pick up her blanket and fold it over on the back of the couch. She picked up her pillow, fluffed it and dropped it back on the couch. With a heavy chest, she looked around the small trailer, lit by a single bulb on under the kitchen cabinet. As much as she didn’t like it, it was home.

She walked out of her house and started her run down the side of the two lane highway. There wasn’t usually much activity in the early morning so it was a nice way to clear her head and do her own patrol of the town. The county sheriff wasn’t ever much help with any sort of crimes and as low as a profile Maggie was trying to keep, she couldn’t just let things happen. She had solved a robbery and deescalated a hostage situation with machine gun wielding yokel who had holed up in the town’s only bar. A few people in town were curious and started asking her about her past, but all the interest fell away because it wasn’t a town that people with pleasant pasts moved to.

She had gotten a mile into her run when she heard the truck. The pitch and the rumble were a dead give away to who the driver was. She looked to the side as the sun started to come up over the dirt hills.

“Hey Maggie V!”

“Baxter,” Maggie waved as she continued to run. She could see him in his ridiculous maroon and gold shorts through the hole in the side of his truck where a door should be. “How’s the hunting this morning?”

He gestured to the back of his truck, speaking with a lit cigarette bobbing up and down as he spoke. “Only one. You want me to cook it up for you? Breakfast?”

“No thanks,” Maggie shook her head.

He glanced in front of them, his aged aviator sunglasses reflecting the rising sun. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and turned his head away from Maggie to exhale. When he replaced the cigarette, he addressed her, “When I find the nest and the eggs you’ll be the first to know. See you at the gym.”

“Bye Baxter,” Maggie waved again as he pulled away. She remembered something she meant to tell him yesterday. She yelled before he could drive away. “Stop shooting at stop signs!”

He grinned at her, as he pulled away. “Yes, Ma’am!”

She shook her head, watching him drive off. It was unreal to her that a year ago everything in her life was so perfect and then after everything…

She finished her run thinking about how everything was so different. There was one major change that she hated more than anything. As she hopped up the stairs to her house and opened the flimsy door, she grabbed the thin chain that was always around her neck. She pulled it until a small locket connected to a key came out of the top of her sports bra.

Lockets were… lame and sentimental, but it was all Maggie had at the moment. She couldn’t keep digital records. She couldn’t even put the SD card she had pulled out of her phone into her computer because it could be tracked. Instead, she had one picture in her locket. It was small but it meant the world.

Alex’s smiling face looking up at her from the gold housing. She had taken it of Alex while they were watching a movie together on Alex’s couch. It was supposed to be sent to Kara as proof that they weren’t both overworking. But Alex looked so happy, Maggie forgot to send it. She just looked at the picture until the real thing asked her what was wrong. She confessed that she’d never been happier and Alex did the same.

The picture in the locket helped remind her of the reason for her isolation. She would never run from a fight, but when she looked at the locket she remembered that she wasn’t running away. She was protecting Alex. Despite not being together anymore, Alex was still important to her and Cadmus seemed to know that the feeling were reciprocated, because they would keep coming after her.

Maggie took a deep breath and moved to the small fridge in the wall of her trailer. It clicked open and she pulled out a purifying water pitcher and got down a glass. She filled up the glass and then filled up the bright green kettle on the gas stove. Once that was set to boiling, she sipped the water and stepped back outside on her porch.

The sun shone straight into the deck between the railing and the tarp awning, right into her eyes. She stood on the deck, soaking up the sun until she could hear the kettle whistling. She prepared her french press and poured the hot water into it. She grabbed a coffee cup, put some powered creamer in the bottom of it and picked up the french press, putting both handles into one hand.

She walked outside, down the steps, and around to the back of the trailer. There was a ladder on the back that was too high for her to get on without the broken AC unit she’d pushed under it. She climbed up on top of the AC unit and then onto the ladder, climbing up with one hand.

Once she could see the top of the trailer, she set the mug and the french press down next to the ladder. After she hefted herself up, she stood tall on top of her trailer. She picked up her mug and the coffee and walked toward the pink yoga mat that was held down with a brick on each corner.

She poured the coffee into the mug and set both the coffee and the mug near the top of the yoga mat. As usual, she moved to stand in the middle of the mat to begin her morning yoga and coffee.

The traffic on the highway was starting to pick up. A lot of people who lived in Unincorporated Leigh had jobs a few towns away. The trucks and the beaters flew down the highway and some people drove into the Cactus Needle Bar for breakfast. There weren’t a lot of places to eat. The Cactus Needle was the only one open for breakfast.

Maggie chose to finish her coffee on the roof of her dwelling before crawling down. She popped a frozen breakfast sandwich into the microwave and jumped in the shower. The only thing that was always good about living in Unincorporated Leigh was the showers. The water was always hot no matter how long she was in the shower and the water pressure was amazing.

After her shower, she towel dried her hair and changed into her work clothes. It wasn’t a uniform per se. She just wore her second nicest jeans and a tank top. She threw her hair into a ponytail, grabbed her breakfast, her sunglasses off of the counter, and her leather jacket as she was walking out the door.

She held her sandwich in her mouth as she put on her sunglasses and leather jacket, making her way down the stairs. There was no reason to lock her trailer. She’d know if someone had been in there and if anyone did wander in, they wouldn’t find anything worth taking.

She took a bite of her sandwich and reached into her jacket pocket. Her phone was older, less trackable, but less sophisticated. She flipped it open and checked the screen. There was nothing. No missed calls, no new messages, no unread emails.

Maggie shook her head at herself as she walked to the front of her trailer and took another bite of her sandwich. She threw her leg over her dirt bike, the best mode of transportation in the particular desert hell she lived in. It started up beautifully and she had even taken to learning how to do the maintenance on it herself. She was pretty good at it and all six hundred and fourty-four ccs ran smoothly.

She polished off her breakfast in two more bites and started the engine. With a small flurry of dust behind her, she sped off to work.

It wasn’t far. Only a five minute drive if she cut through the abandoned motel parking lot. There was only one room in the entire motel that hadn’t been broken into and ransacked. The door was still closed and locked. She knew that for sure.

Finally she popped over a ridge and pulled to a stop behind a square white building made of cinderblocks. She used her heel to put her kickstand down and got off of the bike. She felt her chest to make sure the key and the locket were still there as she moved to the dented back door.

The back door was locked, but the key was dangling on a string from the handle. Her only coworker wasn’t big on safety. She used the key to unlock the back door and took the lanyard off of the knob.

The smell of lemon cleaner hit her, especially in the eyes. Someone had been overzealous with it on the floor. She shuffled through the back room, past the shelves stocked with extra merchandise. She flipped on the switch before stepping into the store. It wasn’t much. Just a small gas station, but it was probably the nicest place in town. It was also one of the most profitable.

She flipped on the switch for the coffee maker and turned on the hot dog rolling machine. She made a throwing up noise as she walked past it. There was no telling how long those hot dogs had been rolling on it. But it was part of her job to turn it on.

She reached for the gun in the back of her pants when she saw a shadow, but when her eyes focused, she found it was just one of the regulars standing outside of the store. She crossed the store toward the door and flipped the lock back.

When there was a click, the woman outside turned around. Maggie was moving behind the register as the door opened with a ding. “Good morning, Nina.”

“’Mornin’, Mags,” the woman walked into the store. She walked past all the shelves, going straight to the coffee.

“How are your boys?” Maggie asked. She shrugged off her jacket and turned on the small TV tucked under the register. She turned the volume down, but watched the news scroll along the bottom.

“They’re fine,” Nina answered. “One of them got under the refrigerator last night. We had to move it to get ‘em out.” She opened up one of the fridges and got out a can of beer. Then she turned to the coffee maker and got one of the styrofoam cups out of the holder, waiting for the pot to finish.

Maggie hated watching the news, but she knew it was important. If she saw Alex on the news, she was getting a car to go back to National City that very second. But she didn’t see Alex. It was a picture of the other Danvers that caught her eye. A graphic flashed onto the screen  _ Where is Supergirl? _

“Where is Supergirl?” Maggie whispered to herself. “Where’s Kara?”

She looked up from the TV when a metallic clink hit the counter in front of her. She looked at her watch. “You have to wait five more minutes.”

Nina gestured to the cigarette boxes over her head. “Then get me a box o’ Slims and I’ll take a smoke break outside.”

Maggie slid the case open and pulled out a pack of Nina’s favorites.

“You’re such a stickler for rules,” Nina took the pack and shook her head as she walked out to stand in front of the store and smoke.

Maggie looked back at the TV. The crawler at the bottom read: Girl of Steel missing for a week. Maggie knelt down to get a better look at the screen. “Where are you Kara?” She knew that in the new National City, missing wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Alex was technically missing. Cat Grant was missing. Winn was missing. Guardian and Supergirl were the only things standing between National City and complete chaos because they had both managed to keep their identities secret.

Maggie stared at the TV, looking at every face in the background. She searched for Alex. She needed to know that Alex was okay and she couldn’t imagine that Alex would stay away long if Kara was missing.

When the door opened again Nina had come to collect the rest of her purchases. “Maggie?”

Maggie blinked up from the TV. “Uh, sorry. Ten eighty-two.”

“Same as always,” Nina dug in her pocket, grabbed the ten, some change, and placed it on the counter. “See ya in a bit.”

“Bye,” Maggie muttered, putting the money in the register.

She watched the news of the chaos in National City. It always felt like National City was on the brink of destruction, but the people of the city, the people who stayed kept it from going under completely. Guardian and Supergirl were the only ones who could stay, but Maggie bet that Winn was helping remotely. Apparently another symbol had emerged from the rubble, but her tiny screen wouldn’t let her see more than a red splotch next to the angular Supergirl symbol.

She knew why she couldn’t go back. She knew that if she went back, there was a high chance she could a captured and used as bait to lure Alex back out into the open. And Alex was Cadmus enemy number one.

So instead of hopping on her bike like she wanted, Maggie sat back in the flimsy plastic lawn chair and pulled her book out from the shelf under the counter. She cracked it open and pulled out the pencil and scrap of paper that was keeping her place.

She didn’t go to medical school and her biology course in college felt like a lifetime ago so she wrote down the words she didn’t understand in her copy of Extraterrestrial Virology by Eliza Danvers. Of course that wasn’t what the outside of the book said. Maggie had peeled off the plastic cover of the hardback and replaced it with a large sticker she had printed a few towns over of The Alchemist.

She got to read for a solid half hour before someone else came into the store. It was another regular making a b-line for the cooler in the back. Maggie closed her book, stood up, and leaned on the counter. “Good morning, Paul.”

Paul just grunted in response and Maggie didn’t expect anything different. He was one of the least friendly people in Unincorporated Leigh and when she met him for the first time, he was wearing a Humans Only Earth shirt that they immediately got into an argument over. Maggie had gone days without sleeping at that point and if Baxter hadn’t shown up when he did to diffuse the situation, Maggie would have decked Paul.

She leaned on the clear plastic lottery case waiting for Paul to make his daily selection. He picked out a lottery ticket, a can of cheap beer, and a candy bar. He paid in exact change and didn’t say another word to Maggie as he left.

“Asshole,” she muttered after him and sunk back down into her chair to continue reading.

Around lunch time, Maggie picked up the corded phone that belonged to the gas station and called the Needle down the road.

“Cactus Needle,” the perpetual bartender and de facto mayor of Unincorporated Leigh answered.

“Hey, Steph,” Maggie answered.

“Hey honey,” Steph’s voice became friendlier when she heard Maggie’s voice. “I was just out at Bobby’s place. I got some really nice-looking vegetables I think you’ll like.”

“That sounds great,” Maggie smiled. Steph had become mayor because she was already like the town mom. She treated anyone in town under forty like her kids. She made sure they ate, she helped Maggie get the job at the gas station, she’d seen Steph giving people tours of the town in her golf cart. Without Steph, Unincorporated Leigh was just a dirt town, home to a bunch of hermits who wouldn’t talk to each other.

Maggie heard a loud motorcycle pull up to one of the two gas pumps outside. A large biker got off of his bike and sauntered inside. Steph was explaining how she had been watching a lot of Food Network and wanted to try out some new recipes.

The door to the gas station opened and the biker walked in. Something about him put Maggie off and she looked him over. He sauntered over to the beer cooler and bent over. Maggie couldn’t see what he was doing, but she heard the hiss and pop of a can opening.

The biker chugged half of the beer as he walked back toward the counter. He met Maggie’s eyes and her grip on the phone tightened so much that the old plastic creaked.

“Pump’s not workin’” he said.

Maggie’s eyes flickered to the pump control and she nodded. “It is. You have to pay first.”

“Maggie?” Steph asked into the phone. “Everything okay?”

Maggie ignored Steph because the biker rested his elbows on the counter and leaned forward. “Already paid. S’not workin’.”

“You didn’t pay,” Maggie raised an eyebrow at him.

The biker stood up straight and held the half empty beer can over the floor. He let it go and the second it hit the floor, beer shot out of the top of it.

Maggie took a deep breath and set the phone down on the counter. “Looks like you spilled.” She walked around the counter. “I’ll show you where the mop is.”

She had barely gotten around the counter before he pulled the gun from the holster under his leather vest. He didn’t get it pointed at her before she was close enough to strike. She grabbed his wrist and slammed it into the counter. The gun went off, putting a hole through a calendar on the wall. She hit his wrist again and the gun clattered to the ground.

He howled in pain and grabbed her neck with his other hand. She held onto his hand, swinging her arms up and around, knocking his arm away from her neck with his other arm. She managed to pivot him enough so she could kick the back of his knee, sending him slamming onto the ground. All it took was a small push forward for his entire body to be face down on the white tile, his cheek smashed into a pool of spilled beer.

She reached for handcuffs that weren’t there, fingers only brushing her smooth belt.

The door to the gas station flew open and Steph stood there with a swaying sheriff behind her. Sheriff Clint took a moment to take in the scene before loudly asking, “What’s going on here?”

“She broke my hand!” the biker wailed.

Maggie looked down at the back of the biker’s hand that had been slammed into the counter twice. There was a fair chance she actually broke it.

“It’s obvious what happened,” Steph held the door open and grabbed onto the sleeve of Clint’s uniform to push him inside. “This man tried to rob the store.”

“He may need medical attention,” Maggie took her knee off the biker’s back so Clint could take over.

Clint grunted. “Do you need medical attention, sir?” Clint put the handcuffs on the biker, but had a problem pulling him to his feet. Maggie grabbed his arm and helped, then let go as soon as he stood. Clint pushed the man toward the door. “You want it on your medical forms that a little thing like her broke your hand. I’ll be a nice introduction to the guys when you’re in the upstate pen.”

“His gun,” Maggie pointed to the gun on the counter. She stood aghast when Clint let go of the biker and picked up the gun with his bare hands. She shook her head as Clint walked out with the biker and Steph walked in.

“You okay, honey?” Steph asked.

“Yeah,” Maggie sighed looking at the beer on the floor. “Another day in paradise, right?”

Steph chuckled and walked over to Maggie. She pulled Maggie into her arms giving her a huge hug. “I love you, girl. I’m glad you’re okay.”

“Thanks.” Some of the tension left Maggie’s body. Steph had that effect on people she guessed.

“I’ll go get started on your lunch,” Steph rubbed her arm and stepped around the beer puddle. “Do you need help with this?”

“I got it,” Maggie shuffled toward the back of the store to get the mop.

“I’ll bring you over a scotch,” Steph paused at the door and shot Maggie a wink when Maggie looked at her. “We’ll call it a bounty.”

“You don’t have to,” Maggie broke out in a smile. “I was just… I like helping.”

“I know you do, honey,” Steph waved at her. “I’ll be right back.”

After Maggie was done cleaning up the beer, Steph returned with a grilled chicken salad and a glass of scotch.

“Aren’t you only supposed to serve liquor inside the bar?” Maggie asked, picking up the scotch and bringing it to her nose.

Steph chuckled. “Well it’s a good thing you turned down the deputy job isn’t it?”

Maggie grinned. “Guess so.” She took a sip and hummed. “How much do I owe you?” It was an expensive scotch and she could taste it.

“I told you,” Steph tapped the counter next to the salad. “It’s your bounty. Just remember to bring back my dishes after your shift.”

“Thanks, Steph,” Maggie called before the mayor walked out.

Maggie finished out her day, selling more beer, cigarettes, and lottery tickets than anything else.


	5. Chapter 5

Waking up the way she did was way too kind for the world she lived in. She was pulled out of nice dreams by the gentle call of the waking world.

There was always movement and noise in the hallway and common room near her bunk, but it seemed everyone had calmed for the day.

Alex rolled onto her back and rubbed her face with her left hand. She smiled when she saw Maggie smiling down at her from the picture hanging over her all night. It was the best way to wake up if she wasn’t allowed the real thing.

She checked her watch and saw that she’d woken up a bit later than usual. It wasn’t usually a luxury she’d allow herself, but she was still sore from the day before. She sat up on her bed, careful not to hit her head. It was a slow less she’d learned, but exiting her bed was more of a lean and less of a sit and stand.

She pushed off of the bed and a ripple of sore moved across her back and curled around her ribs. Her suit protected her body and joints, but she was still moving. She put her hands over her head and forced her body to align itself. The pain wasn’t going to go away if she ignored it.

She ruffled her hair and grabbed her bathroom kit from the chair next to the bed. She slid her feet into her shower sandals and checked the top bunk. Kara wasn’t there. She felt the bed and there was still some remnants of warmth. Kara couldn’t have been gone long.

The door creaked when she opened it, the deceptively heavy metal trying to stay closed against the day. The hallway was lit with the same sickly off-white glow it always was. The fluorescent lights of the bathroom weren’t much kinder.

Alex did her morning routine in the bathroom, finding only a few lone agents running in to pee, but running back out so they could get back on their post. It put a little more urgency in her step. She didn’t want to miss anything either.

She changed into some black workout pants and a tank top. It wasn’t her usual work attire and she wouldn’t have dreamed of coming to work so casually before, but she never dreamed she would be living at work either.

Her back trainers didn’t make any noise on the concrete floor as she buzzed through the common area. A large carafe of coffee was placed on the conference table in the same place every day. Alex grabbed a mug from the bunch of them near the carafe and got herself a cup.

Then she made her way up the stairs with her coffee to the Command center. It seemed calm. Everyone was gathering information and putting it together. Vasquez seemed to be in charge at the moment, meaning that J’onn was asleep, taking a shower, or training with Kara.

Vasquez saw Alex walking in and grabbed a tablet to meet her over at the center War Table. Alex took a sip of coffee as Vasquez woke up the table and started feeding relevant data into it. “Based on last night’s influx of data on the Cadmus safehouses, agents have surveilled operations,” she pulled up two floating video feeds in front of Alex, “found another safehouse and,” she changed the video to two different teams pulling up to two different buildings, exiting the vehicles, and clearing out the entire buildings. “Effectively shut them down.”

“What about the tech?” Alex asked, taking in the videos.

“They did manage to wipe a few drives, but there was a lot that is still operational,” Vasquez shut down the videos when they were over. “Agent Schott is going over it in the Faraday Cage.”

Alex nodded. “So last night wasn’t for nothing.”

“It really wasn’t,” Vasquez turned toward the wall of monitors.

For the first time since she walked in, Alex looked up at the monitors. There were more than a few news stations covering riots. When Alex looked more closely, she could see it was National City. People were in the streets, carrying signs, and chanting. Just as she was about to turn away and ask what it had to do with the night before, she saw it. The red bat painted on a bed sheet and held high by two pieces of lumber by protestors.

Alex watched the protestors and saw more symbols. She saw the crest of the House of El and the red Bat. She saw the shape of Guardian’s shield spray painted on cardboard. People were marching with their heroes.

Alex put her hand over her mouth, contemplating what it meant. An entire city was rallying around her and Kara and James. They were the symbols of hope. She wasn’t used to being the face of good. She worked in the background, happy to toil in the dark so her sister would be the hero. Now she had been shoved into the light and it was heavy.

“It’s a start,” Vasquez interrupted Alex’s spiral of responsibility shouldering. She turned to Alex. “We have a lot of intel to gather before we’re ready to stage a mass-scale assault.”

Alex took a deep breath. She was right. Alex nodded to Vasquez. “Thanks. I’ll be back in a few hours. I’ll be on B3 after breakfast if you need me.” She gestured to her watch. “Call me if anything happens.”

Vasquez nodded.

Alex took her coffee to the stairs that led down. She landed on the bottom basement level, then crossed the basement level where she’d be partaking in her morning workout. It was a former basement that managed to have all of the amenities of a fitness spa as well as some state of art training complexes. There was even a deadening room where Kara and Alex could spar on equal terms.

The parking garage was across the street from the basement, the only thing that connected them was a service tunnel where trucks would be unloaded from the garage and moved through the tunnel then up into the building as needed.

The tunnel had become a closely guarded secret even to the people who lived in the parking garage. DEO Agents were stationed on both sides and the only people who moved through regularly were the DEO Agents who brought food upstairs, the Danvers sisters, and James.

Alex nodded to the agents guarding the tunnel. It was metal all the way around and felt like a trap every time Alex walked through it. When she got out to the other side, she ran a hand through her damp hair and nodded again to the agents on the Parking Garage side of the tunnel.

Through the truck sized threshold, she stopped at the edge of the loading dock. The bottom floor of the basement was mostly used for storage. There were DEO agents walking around, taking inventory and moving things around.

One of the newer recruits stopped what he was doing the second he saw Alex and straightened up. “Deputy Director.”

She nodded to him, then jumped down from the loading platform. “How are things?”

“Secure,” he told her. He looked around for something else to report on. Suddenly he brightened up. “It’s, uh, one of the kids’ birthdays so we had pancakes for breakfast.”

Alex let out a smile. It was good news. She was glad that the people and extraterrestrials seeking refuge with them were still finding reasons to celebrate. “I’m glad to hear that.”

He nodded again. “Also, there’s an NCPD Detective asking for you.” He gestured to the ceiling above them where the people were.

Alex’s heart skipped a beat. She cleared her throat trying not to seem too excited about it. “Did you get a name?”

“Uh,” the agent picked up a tablet and tried to remember. “I sent an email to Vasquez. I think his name was…”

Alex’s entire demeanor fell when the agent said ‘he’. It wasn’t Maggie. There was no reason for it to be Maggie, but she had hoped. She took a deep breath and nodded. “I’m sure he’ll find me when I get up there. Thanks, Leon.”

He stopped moving at the sound of his name. He was about to ask Alex how she knew his name but she was already weaving through the pallets piled high with supplies toward the stairs that led upward. She came up through a doorway that was locked with a code and walked up through the back of the kitchen. For a parking garage, it was a surprisingly high end industrial kitchen. Several DEO agents were wearing aprons and laughing in the kitchen.

They straightened up a bit when Alex walked through the door, but Alex just nodded and walked through the kitchen. She exited the kitchen and into a loud space just outside the walls put up to make the parking garage a livable place.

There were plastic picnic tables lined up in four long rows. Families were eating breakfast together. Friends were laughing. It was the most normal thing Alex could think of. She loved eating breakfast among them because they made her feel grounded. Everything in the basement of the L-Corp building was business. It was the brain and muscle of one side of a war. But the parking garage was the heart.

She saw the small boy sitting in the middle of a crowd of people. His skin was silvery and he seemed to sparkle. It was definitely an alien but there were people around him from multiple planets wishing him happy birthday. Alex didn’t join them because it didn’t feel like her celebration. She got in the back of the line for food. No one but the agents in the kitchen knew who she was. She was just a face in the crowd to the people of the Parking Garage.

Alex shuffled along and picked up a tray. She politely asked for eggs and bacon, only taking a single pancake at the insistence of a woman in front of her telling her it was a day to celebrate. She skipped the coffee and picked up a glass of water at the end of the line.

She sat by herself at the far end of one of the tables. The eggs weren’t great but the bacon was crispy. Alex was mentally going over her post-breakfast workout when someone sat down across from her.

She knew who sat down, she just couldn’t remember his name immediately. It took her a moment of sifting through the remnants of her old life. “Detective Cordell.”

He nodded to her, giving a half-hearted smile. “Hey,” he swallowed, having a problem looking directly at her. “I, uh…” He cleared his throat. His normally clean shaven face had grown out and his usually kept hair was wild. He wasn’t wearing the suit Alex was used to seeing him in. He was wearing an old white t-shirt and jeans.

“Are you okay?” Alex asked, looking him over.

He nodded. “Been undercover.” He looked around and swallowed. “You’d be surprised what the homeless people in town know.” He rubbed his face. “Look, I… I’m sorry about Sawyer. I heard… the explosion and…”

Alex’s chest felt tight and she put her fork down. She nodded knowing that Cordell was just trying to be kind. But she had had her fill of heartfelt condolences. They came in an onslaught after the explosion and had petered out since. No one had even brought it up since they’d been forced to move into the L-Corp building. Until Cordell sat across from her.

She looked down at her food and then back up at him. “Yeah, thanks.”

“Sawyer was, uh…” He rapped his knuckles on the table and looked down at the bench between his legs. “She was smart as hell.” He licked his lips. “Which is why I’m here.”

Alex perked up. His demeanor changed from that of an awkward acquaintance to someone with information. “What do you mean?”

He scratched the area between his eyebrows and leaned on the table. “So, Sawyer dies last year.” He put both of his forearms on the table.

The simple sentence punched Alex in the gut even if she knew it was false.

“A few months ago,” he gestured around. “Before the lockdown, I start getting all of her mail.”

“Maggie’s mail?” Alex asked.

He nodded. “Yellow stickers and everything. Someone forwarded all her mail to my place.” He shrugged. “I didn’t really think much of it. Mostly motorcycle magazines and overdue bills.” He looked at the table again. “I paid most of the bills. I mean, her apartment didn’t use much electricity with no one in it and the water was nothing.” He swallowed and looked at Alex, an urgency in his eyes. “But about a month ago, I got a package. Sent from Star City. The only thing in it was this.”

He reached into his pocket and pulled out a small smartphone. There was a sticky note rubber banded around it. The name on the sticky note was DANVERS.

“It took me a while to track you down,” he told her.

She carefully picked up the phone and looked it over. It looked brand new, like it had never even been turned on. It was an older smart phone that could be bought at a gas station anywhere. She was careful not to touch the sticky note, but she knew the handwriting anywhere.

“Where’s the package?” Alex asked.

“I burned it,” he shrugged. “I’m not at my place most of the time. I didn’t want to just leave it.”

“Thank you,” Alex looked at the phone, a strange excitement coursing through her. She was holding something that Maggie touched. She wanted to get it back into the basement, but she knew she had to be smart. “That’s smart.”

“We’re still out there working,” he told Alex abruptly. He stood up from the table. “Those of us left at NCPD. We’re helping where we can.”

“I know,” Alex nodded. “Thank you.” She looked at the phone again, breakfast forgotten. “Maybe we could make this a weekly thing. You were Maggie’s partner right? Before Science Division?”

“Intelligence,” he nodded. “I swear she knew at least one person in every shady part of the city. She’d be a lot of help… I mean…” he seemed disappointed with his own words. “She’s missed.”

“Yeah,” Alex nodded again, standing from the table. “Definitely.” She pocketed the phone and picked up the tray with her leftover food on it.

“Next week?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Alex told him.

“Uh, can I finish that?” he asked, pointing to the tray she was about to dump out.

“Of course,” she put the tray back on the table. “Thank you.”

Alex didn’t remember most of the walk back to the Basement. She ran through the tunnel and up the stairs. When she got to the second level of the basement, she tapped her watch. “Vasquez. Have Winn and Kara meet me at the Faraday Cage.”


End file.
